astro
catdynamics | April 30, 2011Time lapse movie of extensive aurora series over Iceland
Gorgeous.
AURORA ISLANDICA - a Northern Lights Timelapse from Agust Ingvarsson on Vimeo.
From pressan.is
Over many nights and multiple locations in and near Reykjavík.
catdynamics | April 27, 2011NASA's Kepler mission has now been looking for transiting exoplanets for almost two years, and while we wait for the release of the next set of data and identified candidate exoplanets, they produced a very striking summary of what they got so far.
These are all 1235 exoplanet candidates from the first set of data releases!
The image shows the planet candidates and their host stars to scale, with the relative stellar size also shown correctly to scale, and the stellar colour rendered accurately.
This is a really really nice illustration of what Kepler has found to date.
It should be noted…
catdynamics | April 24, 2011curious flap over leaked internal memo from LHC's ATLAS collaboration over at "Not Even Wrong"
hints of Higgs at 115 GeV in γγ decay
intriguing but too vague and unconfirmed for the physics to be interesting at this point.
Sociology of the comments is interesting.
catdynamics | April 14, 2011
Null result reported from XENON100 experiment on Cold Dark Matter detection attempt.
Xenon100 reports no CDM detection
Parameter space starts groaning as it is squeezed tighter...
Definitely not croquet...
paper on arXiv
catdynamics | April 13, 2011Official word on the IXO x-ray mission now, with rumours from Europe on what the European Space Agency has in mind.
LISA must be rebranded, quick!
IXO News
"This is an update on the discussions with the European Space Agency (ESA) at the recent ESA-NASA bilateral meeting.
...
ESA has ended consideration of IXO and the other concepts as partnerships at the scale proposed in the New Worlds New Horizons decadal survey (NWNH) and EJSM/Laplace in Visions and Voyages for Planetary Science.
Instead, ESA has begun a rapid definition effort that includes the formation of a new science team (to be…
catdynamics | April 8, 2011NASA has some official word on what is going on in astrophysics in general and with LISA in particular.
LISA and IXO ended.
Teams supported through Oct '11, if budget is not cut more.
New concept studies.
LISA and Changes in the Cosmic Vision Programme (pdf)
LISA and Changes in the Cosmic Vision Programme
"Based on discussions with the European Space Agency (ESA) at the recent ESA- NASA bilateral meeting, we provide the following information concerning LISA. Readers are advised to refer to any ESA postings - when available - for details and clarifications regarding the Cosmic Vision…
catdynamics | April 8, 2011It is friday, and we prepare to close down for the weekend.
So we splish over to the iPod and we ask...
Oh, mighty iPod: what writing will we see on the wall when the slate is clean?
Whoosh goes the randomizer.
Whoosh.
The Covering: The Message - Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five
The Crossing: Skyttan (live) - MX-21
The Crown: Just the two of us - Bill Withers
The Root: One of These Days - Pink Floyd
The Past: Towers of London - XTC
The Future: The Boy Done Good - Billy Bragg
The Questioner: Woodstock - Joni Mitchell
The House: She's So High - Tal Bachman
The Inside: The Boy in the…
catdynamics | April 8, 2011NASA has discovered a new kind of unique mineral on a rare meteorite found in Antarctica in the '60s.
New Type of Mineral in Historic Meteorite
It turns scientists into slavering all devouring monsters
"The new mineral was discovered within the meteorite officially designated Yamato 691 enstatite chondrite. The meteorite was discovered the same year as other landmark meteorites Allende and Murchison and the return of the first Apollo lunar samples. The study of meteorites helps define our understanding of the formation and history of the solar system.
...
a mineral formed from only two…
catdynamics | April 6, 2011IXO and LISA are dead and disbanded as NASA missions.
We are looking at a very thin pipeline and few new missions for a while, unless there is drastic new direction from above and strong guidance on funding.
NASA is a mission oriented agency.
This is especially true of Astrophysics.
At any given time, there are operating missions, missions in development, and planned future missions, each at various stages of effort.
Each mission successfully launched has a nominal operating lifetime, after which it may be considered for an "extended mission", if possible.
NASA tends to have catastrophic…
catdynamics | April 6, 2011Martin Rees wins 2011 Templeton Prize
£1,000,000 - nothing to sneeze at.
Hope he doesn't spend it all at once...
Sean's take at CV
PZ has his knickers in a twist over this - kinda grabbed the wrong end of the stick on this one...
In contrast, Andy at eAstronomer goes all sensible and stuff on Martin
catdynamics | April 1, 2011Friday. Prospies. Argh.
Another week over, and another dozen prospies run ragged.
So, Oh Mighty iPod One: what are they all going to do?
Woosh goes the randmozier.
Woosh.
The Covering: Now and Then - Arlo Guthrie
The Crossing: Hey Tonight - Creedence Clearwater Revival
The Crown: Must I Paint You A Picture - Billy Bragg
The Root: Islands - The XX
The Past: 40 - U2
The Future: Gekk Ég Upp Á Hólinn - Þula
The Questioner: We Built This Village On A Trad. Arr. Tune - HMHB
The House: Blake's Jerusalem - Billy Bragg
The Inside: I Cover the Waterfront - Billie Holliday
The Outcome: Death of a…
catdynamics | March 26, 2011Savage article on JWST history and funding from Ron Cowen at Science News.
""It's a game of you lie and I'll swear to it," says Michael Griffin, NASA's administrator from April 2005 to January 2009. "The whole community talks itself into unrealistic cost estimates.... Everyone knows it's wrong. Every engineer knows it's utterly without foundation, but engineers aren't making the decisions.""
If only an experienced engineer had headed NASA at the critical time, ensuring realistic cost estimates and funding profiles with guidance from HQ...
This is going back to the Casani report on JWST -…
catdynamics | March 14, 2011some weeks ago, a number of our colleagues became unaccountably busy, disappearing into their offices, holding long, late night telecons, haranguing stressed postdocs
what they had in common was their membership of the LIGO science collaboration
well, social networks report that at the LIGO-VIRGO meeting all was revealed
the LIGO Internal Affairs division had done a blind injection of an artificial realistic gravitational radiation event to see if the data analysis pipeline actually performs as advertised
apparently it did, the blip was picked up, I presume we will hear soon how well they…
catdynamics | March 4, 2011Well, that was exciting.
So, it is friday again, and we're keeping this here blog limping along through gratuitous lite blogging, again, as we welcome the iPod iChing to the Five'n'Dime...
So, no offence NASA, the much jinxed Next Generation Space Telescope has kinda been stuck out there on its own in the NASA Science Directorate, almost like an invitation...
So, Oh Mighty iPod One: what will become of the James Webb Space Telescope in these uncertain times?
Whoosh goes the iPod.
Whoosh.
The Covering: Don't Worry Baby - Beach Boys
The Crossing: The First Day of Spring - Noah and the Whale…
catdynamics | February 25, 2011Every year we contemplate the Hubble Call for Proposals demand curve.
Four years ago we started to quantify the demand curve
the calm rational analysis soon broke into a nerd gambling frenzy
we then started theorizing about proposal scale invariance which annoyingly enough apparently works
by then Julianne was analyzing the observations of the proposal submission rate - this was back in the good old days when blogging was hot and we had time to actually do stuff
so, can't let a good analysis down:
this is the linear plot, the time is in theorist units, rounded
data collected anecdotally…
catdynamics | February 25, 2011As the Hubble deadline slips away, later than ever, we ask the Mighty iPod One the question whose answer we all must know:
Oh, Mighty iPod One: what will come out of Hubble for cycle 19?
Whoosh goes the iPod.
Whoosh.
The Covering: Deep Dark Truthful Mirror - Elvis Costellor
The Crossing: O Isis und Osiris - Mozart
The Crown: Richard - Billy Bragg
The Root: Carnival of the Animals: Aviary
The Past: I'm on Fire - Johnny Cash
The Future: Interlude VI - Mannheim Steamroller
The Questioner: Oksn - Ruth Rubin
The House: Ten Little Fish - Twin Sisters
The Inside: The Obvious Child -…
catdynamics | February 20, 2011So, got confirmation of initial round of cuts.
NASA HQ is preparing for budget problems by starting to pull back funds already allocated, in anticipation of fiscal year 2010-11 cuts. Between possible government shutdown, and the uncertainty over the Senate response to the House cuts, and a possible veto, it is hard to know what the funding will be in the end, or indeed if there will be any guidance on what to cut.
So...
Major cuts to current ongoing mission operations and data analysis.
Specifcally, Swift and Chandra are cut. I hear three other missions are also cut, but don't know which…
catdynamics | February 8, 2011So I've been hanging out at the Indirect and Direct Detection of Dark Matter conference this week, and been struck by several things.
It is a good meeting, enthusiastic crowd, definite excitement in the air.
It would have read much better if the title had been "Direct and Indirect Detection of Dark Matter", but that would have been wrong...
This is not my usual turf, though I was on a couple of papers on the adiabatic contraction of collisionless matter during growth of supermassive black holes, which is a way to get very high dark matter densities (QHS95 and SHQ95).
Basically a "spike" in…
catdynamics | January 13, 2011So all good things must come to an end, and the 3000 or so astronomers disperse from SEA-TAC to destinations worldwide.
It was a good meeting, though light on major announcements.
I have a backlog of press releases that I may or may not get round to picking over.
Some nice pretty pics in there.
Think I did ok for myself, we'll see how it goes.
As we were wrapping up and heading for the last couple of exoplanet sessions, John (no not that John, the other John) pointed out a couple of poignant remnants
Wery Silli
The large astrophysics missions were doing Silli Band swag:
a LISA constellation…
catdynamics | January 12, 2011The science is interesting, the schmoozing is essential, the students are promising, but, at the end of the day, it is The Swag that is cool.
Last year's winner, the LSST little blue pedometer is back, with the promise of another piece of etched optical glass to the winner of the drawing from the ten-mile hikers.
But, as the arbitrary arbitrator of the contest, there can not be a repeat winner...
so, what have we got?
There's the usual calendars and poster, postcards and bookmarks, not to mention the luggage tags and key chains. Good basic swag, handy for handing to kids, marking books and,…